In a New York state of mind

I went back to Long Island and explored the excitement of suburban weed

“Want to hear about the first time I smoked weed?” my dad asked me and my husband while we were relaxing on my parents’ outdoor porch last week. We were visiting my family on Long Island, New York, where I grew up.

“I was 18 and at NYU, so I was in one of the [campus] buildings,” my dad said, explaining that he had enrolled in the university’s engineering program and was starting school. He ended up not finishing and became a roadie instead, eventually touring and in charge of sound on Rod Stewart’s Maggie May tour, but for one brief moment, he was enrolled.

Since my dad was born in 1950, he said it must have been 1968 or 69. He was sitting next to a recently returned Vietnam veteran who had his leg blown off. My dad sighed about something, and the man tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to look at the man sitting there, holding a joint.

“Want me to change your mind?” my dad says he said. He took it, smoked it later, and never went back. He said he’d never forget it and laughed. Since I’ve embarked on this phase of my career, this cannabis writing, my dad has increasingly felt comfortable smoking with me and sharing his own stories about his use and even growing and low-key entrepreneurial tendencies in the realm (if you catch my drift).

It’s been a fun bonding experience, and I cherish the fact that we can share these parts of our lives before it’s too late. I think of all the people who aren’t able to do these very ordinary things, like just smoking a joint, with even their loved ones, and it’s strange to me. Prohibition has deeper tentacles than we often realize.

When I was younger, living and growing up on Long Island and in New York City, I’m not sure I ever wondered what legal weed might be like. It was just one of those things I accepted about life: I will get older, I have to go to school, then I will get a job, and weed is illegal.

A lot has changed in those twenty-or-so years: now, weed is legal in New York! And we know it has not been rolled out well. Still, things are changing, and it was exciting to dip back in to see what’s going on, especially where I grew up.

I've realized that Long Island is a wild place, but nobody who lives there thinks it is. They think it’s normal life, but it’s not: It’s an island of NYC bedroom communities feeding into and off of its satellite city, at once one of the wealthiest places on the planet (see: the North Shore communities, the vibe of which was memorialized by F. Scott Fitzgerald) and the poorest (see: the mainly Central American immigrant communities in the center island, South Shore, and East End towns). These divisions aren’t specific to Long Island, but they are more stark, owing to the level of extreme wealth found there, thanks to its proximity to New York and the geographic inclusion of the Hamptons.

Long Island is also a cop island, perhaps not coincidentally. Its police forces from its two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are the highest-paid county employees on Long Island. Law enforcement employees in Nassau and Suffolk counties earned record-high overtime pay in 2022, with hundreds racking up more than $100,000 in overtime each and eight making more than $200,000. At one point, while I was growing up there, Nassau PD officers were the highest paid in the nation.

The island’s politics follow suit. I grew up in a vortex of Irish- and Italian-American and Jewish middle-class-and-up families. The latter tended to vote Democrat; the former voted primarily Republican and still do. Long Island went for Trump in 2020, and based on the signs and comments of people I heard while I was there, it sounds like it’ll go that way this year, too.

I love where I grew up–it is a profoundly core part of who I am, culturally speaking—but it confuses me. I’m not sure I could survive the rat race there, physically or mentally, and it’s one reason I’ve stayed in California and out of the suburbs. It is not that the cultural divide is any less stark or strange here, but being away from “home” has allowed me to become my own person with my own politics without the daily influence of where I grew up, which I needed. And as much as everyone might be a closet weedhead on Long Island, I needed to live that out loud more, too, and that is much easier to do in California.

All of these are to say that I love visiting home, but it can be emotionally taxing. It’s become significantly more fun and exciting since legal weed has entered the chat, not because it is going well in New York (it isn’t), but because it has allowed the heads to come out of the shadows and finally convene.

Almost as soon as I arrived back, the signs that everyone smokes weed started popping up. On July 4th, I was at my friend’s house in my hometown. She bought in a neighborhood where many of my childhood friends lived and where I spent a lot of time. We walked to the beach and passed a house with weed plants growing out front. “What’s that?” I shouted, and an old, tan, obviously Italian-American man sauntered down the steps.

Not used to calling people out in public like that, I quickly blurted out, “I’m a cannabis journalist!” and that’s how I met Uncle Frank. It turns out he’s my dad’s age and has been buying from Covelo in Mendocino since the 1970s, supplying my town with weed and listing the names of familiar families he figured I knew. I did. We’ve all been smoking Uncle Frank’s weed for decades.

Then, another guy comes down the stairs and introduces himself as a glassblower, breeder, and grower—the one really in charge of Uncle Frank’s harborfront plants. We quickly discover we all went to the same grade school and that, actually, I’m one of his sister’s closest friends from middle school, with whom I still talk. I had no idea her brother was into weed, so you can expect to see his work featured here soon.

The next day, I headed down to Farmingdale, a 40-minute drive from my parent's house, to Happy Days, one of the two legal adult-use dispensaries on the entire island, which has a population of 7.6 million. I met Shelby of Betty Bloom Social Club, a cannabis pop-up event and education company based on the Island. We found out Shelby grew up a few minutes up the road from me, and we nearly missed attending school together.

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Shelby’s also the marketing director at Happy Days, which is a lovely dispensary. They have an impressive selection from every New York brand I’ve heard of throughout the state and many that I hadn’t heard of. I was thrilled I could actually see and smell the weed, which we can’t do here in California. I was also excited that the security guard merely checked my ID and let me in—no ID copying, no list logging, nothing. No sign that you had ever been there except for your receipt, as it should be. It was also packed, with people filtering in and out and nobody seeming ashamed to be there. I loved it.

I asked Shelby to recommend some buds, and she directed me to the wares of two Long Island farms. I picked up a mixed light eighth of Route 27 Hempyard’s “Slurricane,” grown in Moriches near the Hamptons, where I have spent a ton of time eating pie, sneaking joints in fields, fishing, eating, swimming, and chilling after taking the ferry to Connecticut when I was traveling back and forth from college.

The other eighth was “Pure Kush” from Rolling Stoned’s grow on the Ladies of the Nova Ark farm in The Hamptons. They were good smokes, but the buds were tighter, frostier, and less leafy on the Route 27 eighth. I also picked up live resin from MFNY, which is exceptionally killer: Honey Banana and Rainbow Belts 2.0.

My final observations from the depths of suburban weedland are from my sister’s engagement party, where I realized I was definitely expected to be the plug–a role I’m more than happy to satisfy. It was hilarious. Groups of thirty-somethings constantly walk out from the backyard to the front cul-de-sac, mysteriously reappearing, rinse, and repeat. My dad started calling me The Pied Piper. It was cool to have the party slightly revolve around weed in an organic way, which was not intended. The keg they ordered never even got kicked.

I also realized during these seshes that New Yorkers LOVE the Penjamin. I can imagine why: less access to good flower than the average person has in California and ease of use, especially in small apartments or on the subway. But, as we know, it’s not something I can get into: I don’t trust most 510 batteries, and I definitely don’t trust the distillate oil inside them. Plus, THC distillate highs are the equivalent of smoking brick weed: squinty eyes, that swollen feeling, barely any high, no head change.

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I want to shout out Supernaturals NY, a sustainable and regenerative cannabis farm that ensured I had a care package waiting for me and my dad when I arrived in the Empire State. They stocked it with the finest Hudson Valley sungrown pre-rolls, which packed an incredible punch and kept my friends and family members chilling all holiday weekend, which is frankly no small feat. Thanks for powering the seshes and showing downstate New Yorkers the glory of outdoor-grown weed in their state! My dad couldn’t believe it was grown outside in living soil. I’ll be featuring this grower here soon.

P.S. You cannot get these pre-rolls legally on Long Island yet, but I have made the necessary dispensary introductions :)

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Scooby snacks…

WeedWeek, aka Alex Halperin, continues to kill the game. Here’s his scoop about a DCC officer who was indicted for selling guns. It reminds me of a story I reported for Voice of San Diego a few years ago, which included a San Diego Sheriff Captain who served two years in federal prison for trafficking guns and helping to run illegal cannabis dispensaries. This week, he also uncovered this story about a federal judge who may have widened the path to bankruptcy relief for cannabis companies.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment that allows the Department of Veterans Affairs doctors to recommend medical cannabis to veterans in legal states.

I will be a concentrates judge for the Farmers’ Cup 710 competition, which will be held on August 11. The night before is Jimi Devine & High Rise’s Transbay Challenge for the first time in San Diego, and I’ll be judging there, too. Lol @ me writing about lung health recently.

I was on an hour-long segment on KPBS’ Roundtable yesterday, talking about the food and drink scene in San Diego. I don’t write about it a lot here, but before my cannabis journalism, I was a prolific food and travel journalist (two of my essays made it into consecutive volumes of the Best American Travel Writing anthology, including this Cannabitch piece). For years, I covered the growing restaurant scene in San Diego and Mexico’s Baja California closely, then dipped out to focus on cannabis for several years. Since I joined San Diego Magazine full-time over two years ago, I’ve been brought back into the food media fold: I regularly write food stories, am a co-host of our food podcast, Happy Half Hour, and edit our food news section. I keep calling myself a “former food writer,” but it’s just not true; I am actually presently very much a food writer. I’m back. I accept it, finally.

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